Introduction: The Trust for Public Land, in partnership with the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), is launching Creative Parks, Healthy Communities (CPHC). CPHC will support local health departments across the country to increase health equity through place-based arts and culture. Currently, no guidelines or model of practice exists that brings together stakeholders from arts and culture, public health, and parks to provide best practices on creative place making, health, and green space.

Evidence: Research has consistently shown that building health equity requires approaching neighborhoods, places, and communities as integrated systems that determine health outcomes. CPHC focuses on two determinants that, based on evidence and research, have strong impacts on health outcomes at the individual and population level: arts and cultural expression and parks and greenspace. Place-based arts and culture can redress collective trauma, improve social isolation and exclusion, address mental health, and reduce certain chronic diseases (Sonke 2019).

Program: Building capacity across sectors, the CPHC will provide resources including research evidences and a set of 5-8 case studies of innovative public health work, general process for replicating this work in community contexts, and policy suggestions for advancing this work nationally. Our audience is public health officials and partners within departments of medium and large cities and counties involved in community health and health equity. The presentation will share the toolkit and will review key findings that might be applicable to a broad array of health professionals.

Conclusion: Interventions that build on collaboration and cross sector engagement can mobilize change and increase health equity. CPHC will provide models of practice for health officials and other community development professionals to integrate arts and culture, public health, and parks to ensure healthy, livable neighborhoods.